> Indications of the virus have been found in sewage samples in the area
Oh this decade is going to be insane. We have the technology to solve so much but people no longer have the education and thinking process to use it. Disease and war back on the front burners.
I'm pretty sure we're better educated than any time in human history.
EDIT: Thinking about it, I would guess that we don't have as much humanities education as the prior generation (because it's been devalued), and humanities are what address the questions and problems plaguing our society, the big ones that are too complex to yield to scientific method or algorithms.
> I'm pretty sure we're better educated than any time in human history.
The problem is we've had it so good for so long that we don't remember what it was like. Why take a bunch of preventative stuff for something that never happens? Feels like a waste of time.
In reality, those preventative steps are why it doesn't.
In Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World" he talks about how Europe regressed and became incredibly religious. A lot of secular medicine was lost, and the Queen, the richest person in the last, was pregnant 18 times, 15 dies in childbirth and 3 did not live to be adults. Science has solved these problems not CEOs, or wealth and those are the things we worship in the US
Carl Sagan was also incredibly wrong almost every time he talked about history.
In many ways he was vanguard of the kind of hubris we commonly see today on social media, self assured of his own knowledge.
Just to give you an example. He repeated common misconception about Library of Alexandria being something unique and it's burning being the break between high civilization and barbarism. But it was nothing of the sort.[1] The very fact that the library has been ransacked, burned or otherwise damaged both before and after the "pivotal event" Sagan describes, is a strong indicator of his ignorance.
And doesn't stop there. Whenever Sagan talked about "Dark ages" or anything remotely related he was wrong. The very term has been considered inaccurate at the time, and it is even more so today.[2]
Dang, well Cosmos was a large scale production so we have several people to blame for the inaccuracies. I understand 'The Dark Ages' is considered pejorative and onver-simplified. But there was an overabundance of religous magick being practiced across Europe as the time and I think he makes a lot of good points in the book that I have experienced in my own life. People going towards crystals, or homeopathic remedies for example. And to me that's not so far from these accounts: 'In England, for example, the King’s Touch was believed to heal scrofula, a form of tuberculosis. Prayers to Christ, the Virgin, and saints were always considered the most efficacious form of help. Saint Margaret was invoked for help in childbirth (47.101.65); Saint Fiacre (25.120.227; 17.190.353) for relief from hemorrhoids."
I assume by "religious" you mean Christian. Before Europe became Christian, it wasn't secular, it followed a wide variety of other religions just as devoutly.
Religions don’t cause a uniform level of devotion. It’s easy to fall into the assumption that most religions are similar but that’s because the west is really used to a single family of religions.
> I'm pretty sure we're better educated than any time in human history.
In the past public opinion would be created by a minority of affluent people. Most people were basically peasants (even middle class with nice jobs) and had no chance to affect public opinion. Today public opinion is created by the majority (or manipulated by some shadowy figures with unknown agenda -- I can't make up my mind about it). So you could have more educated people today but still responsible for much smaller fraction of actual public message.
Also in the past the information that most people received was nicely prepared, packaged and delivered by more or less mainstream media. Clear signal, low noise. For better or worse.
Today truly educated and wise people have no access to public because the signal to noise ratio is too low for most people to be able to pick up.
> In the past public opinion would be created by a minority of affluent people. Most people were basically peasants (even middle class with nice jobs) and had no chance to affect public opinion. Today public opinion is created by the majority (or manipulated by some shadowy figures with unknown agenda -- I can't make up my mind about it).
What is this based on? And why would the "minority of affluent people" were any more accurate or good-willed than whoever influences public opinion today? I'm sure those affluent people said things that fit their own interests and experiences, but I don't believe for a moment that affluence correlates with good judgement for everyone else.
Read a detailed account of historical events - the propaganda and inflammatory rhetoric was far worse in many ways. Look at the Spanish-American War, for example.
Disinformation and misinformation may be orders of magnitude worse now, but there was no golden age.
You don't need to censor the nutbars, and it is ok to call them that.
The former is shutting down discourse, the latter is pointing out its flaws, and is a correct response.
When I was in high school, pre-Internet, we has an entire class about modern media.
We discussed advertising, profit motives, watched TV commercials and dissected them, it was all about creating awareness in youth, about something they grew up with and took for granted.
This sort of thing had value, it helps people see things through a different viewpoint, including helping people become more critical of the snakenoil salesman.
We should have such things about the Internet, and youtube, as well.
I bet the average Joe doesn't realise how profitable YouTube channels can be, and thus, how profitable lies are.
> You don't need to censor the nutbars, and it is ok to call them that.
I fully agree. Both sides can call each other nutbars and both sides should not be censored. One person’s nutbar is another person’s geniusbar.
Profit motives and understanding the finances of the media platforms is useful, but it does not address the search for truth and fact beyond the important detail of monetary motivations of the people behind the opinions. Truth and fact takes hard work. It requires access to all sides of the argument/topic, which censorship denies to people, creating a one-sided view that many times does not represent the most accurate view and in some cases has been manipulated (not always for monetary returns) by the dominant forces interested in the matter.
> We have the technology to solve so much but people no longer have the education and thinking process to use it.
To me it's rather our blind reliance on technology that is the problem. People have become dependent on pills and drugs (and vaccines) of all sorts, treating the symptoms rather than the cause more often than not.
Chronic diseases are arguably more prevalent now than at other point in time: obesity, diabetes, cancer, coronary, circulatory etc. The COVID-19 crisis, which exposed the vulnerability of a large part of the population, is a case in point. Governments have spent all that effort and money to develop and administer vaccines on an unprecedented scale, but zero effort was made to make us more resilient, to ameliorate the environment in which we live (pollution kills ~9M humans per year [1]) or the food that we eat and out eating habits (~40% of the world adult population is overweight, ~15% obese [2]).
While COVID-19 may be gone (for now at least), the root causes of why so many millions of people succumbed to it are not. Technology might prove to be a good short term solution, but I believe the required changes are rather political, societal and even moral/spiritual.
Imagine the impact on the GDP of the US if obesity was largely eliminated and diet and exercise incentives were included as part of health plans (eg free membership to fitness clubs and access to certified personal trainers with a 20$ copay). That’s a big reason why it hasn’t happened; instead the focus is on doctors and hospitals treating acute issues instead of preventing them.
Such "Wellness Programs" do exist for health plans in the US, where you get incentivized (e.g. discounts/waived fees/increased coverage) for following whatever behavioral constraints they asked for (e.g. going to a gym, exercising regularly, and so on).
They're not universal, but they are a thing in some cases.
Personal trainers don't cost much more than the equivalent of a $20 copay a session - when I had one it was $250/month (that's equal to $58/week) and I think I got three sessions a week. That's slightly less than $20 a session.
Most personal trainers that I’ve hired cost a minimum $100 per hour. You are getting quite a great deal. That rate is equivalent to the cost of a group session in my area, which does not include individual attention.
I would not rule out detection bias: you can't be diagnosed with those if you can't find it before you are dead. And death used to come s lot sooner for most in the past.
That is an oversimplification. Just to point out one important aspect of this, Vitamin D levels are strongly related to human health and immune system function and have been dropping for decades.
Given that vitamin D is created in our skins by sunlight exposure (or rather, by exposure to UV-B radiation), this corresponds with the employment distribution shifting from agricultural and other outdoor labor work towards office, cubicle-farm jobs. Additionally, making this worse, modern glass is highly impermissible for UV-B radiation [1], meaning that even if you do sit in a well-lit place you won't get enough to create enough vitamin D.
Oh this decade is going to be insane. We have the technology to solve so much but people no longer have the education and thinking process to use it. Disease and war back on the front burners.